Books

Winner of the 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

Poems That Breathe through Grief to Find Comfort in the Natural World

An Introduction to the Life, Work, and “Difficulty” of Reginald Shepherd

The Essential Etheridge Knight is a selection of the best work by one of the country’s most prominent and liveliest poets. It brings together poems from Knight’s previously published books and a section of new poems.

Past winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, this long-time author from Black Sparrow Press is known for her fierce adherence to the truth and a language so musical one can almost hear the blues line underneath her stanzas.

Winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, poetry category. Winner of the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, poetry category.Finalist for the 2015 NAACP Image Awards in Poetry. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude is a sustained meditation on that which goes away—loved ones, the seasons, the earth as we know it—that tries to find solace in the processes of the garden and the orchard. That is, this is a book that studies the wisdom of the garden and orchard, those places where all—death, sorrow, loss—is converted into what might, with patience, nourish us.

Winner of the 2014 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry PrizeWinner of the 2017 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers AwardWinner, 2016 BCALA Literary Award, Poetry CategoryFinalist, 2015 NAACP Image Awards, poetry category

Wild Hundreds is a long love song to Chicago. The book celebrates the people, culture, and places often left out of the civic discourse and the travel guides. Wild Hundreds is a book that displays the beauty of black survival and mourns the tragedy of black death.

In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation—the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence.

Winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Winner of the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.

Finalist for the National Book Award in PoetryRecipient of the 2020 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in PoetryBCALA Honor Book for Best Poetry Award 2020

Winner of the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize

C.D. Wright has described Roberson’s work as “lyric poetry of meticulous design and lasting emotional significance,” comparing its musical qualities to the work of saxophonist Steve Lacy, jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

Etai-Eken is a legend told in a series, a cycle of poems, which is to say, told in different languages. The action of the poems in the poem is their moving in and out of the legend by the changes of access to the larger legend; an access of the present in the ancient, of the present’s knowledge and experience of it.